Internet Bubble

From its peak of 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ composite index fell to a low of 1,387.06 on September 21, 2001, losing well over $6 trillion in capitalization - equivalent to roughly 60 percent of the US gross domestic product. The decline dwarfs all previous market downturns.
Was it foreseeable? Authors Anthony and Michael Perkins prophetically warned of the impending crash of the market in a November 1999 book, called The Internet Bubble: Inside the Overvalued World of High-Tech Stocks--And What You Need to Know to Avoid the Coming Shakeout.
March 2000 to September 2001, five companies, which stood as bell weathers of the new economy - Cisco, Microsoft, Intel, Oracle and Nortel Networks - collectively lost over one trillion dollars in value. That's what the entire market was worth in 1980. As Anthony Perkins, the Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Red Herring magazine points out, The Internet Bubble:

By March 9, 2000, 378 Internet companies were publicly traded, with a collective market capitalization of $1.5 trillion - amazing considering this was supported by only $40 billion in total annual sales; most of which was concentrated in the hands of a few companies such as Qwest, AOL, and Amazon.com. And most incredibly, 87 percent of those 378 Internet companies had yet to even show a quarterly profit.
Between Spring 2000 and July 2001, 300 Internet companies laid-off a total of over 31,000 employees. And 130 dot com companies have closed down altogether. By December 22, 2000, the total market capitalization of public Internet companies had plummeted by 75 percent - meaning over a trillion dollars of value had evaporated in under one year. A staggering 211 out of the 378 public Internet companies that Red Herring follows had seen their stock prices crater by more than 80 percent. Former high-flyers such as DoubleClick, priceline.com and Red Hat - once considered to be core Internet holdings - were now threatening to become penny stocks. And it wasn't just the under-performers that had taken a serious whack in price. Even Internet brand names such as eBay (down 72 percent), Amazon (down 77 percent) and Yahoo (down 84 percent), had seen their stock prices pounded from their 52-week highs.
This plummet in market capitalization was one of the biggest and fastest destructions of wealth in peacetime.